Mark Sampson is the former England women’s manager who arrived at the Lamex in July 2019 as part of a shake-up of Dino Maamria‘s coaching set-up. The Creigiau-raised coach came in as first-team coach ahead of the 2019-20 season to start with. But a string of poor results led to the departure of Maamria barely a month into the campaign. And it would be to Sampson that chairman Phil Wallace turned to for a change in our fortunes.

The decision to name Sampson as caretaker boss with “no time window to this temporary appointment” did not go without its critics. Boro’ was his first job after leaving his England role under a well-documented cloud. We’re not here to go into detail about it, so we’re not going to. It’s for you to read elsewhere and you won’t be short of chances to do so.

Under his management, however, England’s women team arguably achieved more in the last 10 years than their male counterparts have since 1966. In March 2015, the Lionesses won the Cyprus Cup and then – later that year – came third at the World Cup. In doing so, they overcame Germany for the first time in 21 meetings.

By taking charge of Boro’ in September 2019, Sampson had his work cut out with a team suffering injury after injury and struggling to get a win. He had recently-retired striker Alex Revell to help him get us on track as we drifted further down the table; looking awkwardly at the Conference early pace-setters rather than League Two’s. The chairman might have said there was no time window. But the pressure was on to halt the slide before it was too late. We’ll get back to you for richer or poorer to see if Mark Sampson was the man for the job.